Monocoque Construction

1937 ◽  
Vol 41 (318) ◽  
pp. 467-492
Author(s):  
I. J. Gerard
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Thin Metal ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Aircraft Wings ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Single Shell ◽  
The Middle Ages

The general idea of making aircraft of single-shell or monocoque construction is not new. In the middle ages, the great English philosopher and man of science, Roger Bacon, “conceived of a large hollow globe made of very thin metal and filled with ethereal air or liquid fire, which would float on the atmosphere like a ship on water,” and ever since the inception of the aeroplane, suggestions have been made to construct aircraft wings and fuselages in the form of shells like those of crabs, lobsters or other popular crustacea.There is at present, a marked trend in aeroplane construction towards the increasing use of metal covering both for wings and fuselages. The water loads on the hulls and floats of various aircraft have always necessitated the use of a robust skin, and although at first wood was commonly used, this was at an early stage of development, replaced by metal.

scholarly journals Requirements for an Arbitrator: A Comparative Historical Approach

Lex Russica ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
D. A. Kalinina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Significant Feature ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Historical Comparison ◽  
The Middle Ages

The paper presents a comparative legal and comparative historical analysis of one of the aspects of the institution of the arbitration, namely, the election of an arbitrator. The contractual, non-state nature of arbitration leaves the disputing parties with a wide freedom of expression, including in determining the personality of a mediator or intermediaries in resolving a dispute. The paper focuses on identifying the key features that the disputing parties should pay attention to when choosing an arbitrator (judges). The Roman jurists established comprehensive and justified set of personality traits that an arbitrator should possess in order to maintain the general idea of the conclusiveness of judicial decisions. According to the norms of Roman law, an arbitrator must be a free person, physically healthy, with a developed intellect, with life experience, not tainted by immoral acts, not involved in illegal activities, not interested in a certain outcome of the case. In the Middle Ages, the system of mandatory requirements for a mediator in a dispute was reduced due to the simplification of public relations regulated by customary law, which was reflected in legislative documents. Priority was given to the high social stratum, ethnic and religious conformity of the judge to the disputing persons. In modern times, the freedom of litigants to choose arbitrators is almost absolute, taking into account the tendency to individualize the interests of the parties to the conflict and the inability to take into account all the particular circumstances of various disputes that could affect the choice of an arbitrator. Only when resolving economic disputes, the parties were guided by the judge’s special knowledge, which makes it possible to understand the essence of the property dispute and make a fair decision. The analysis made it possible to identify the continuity of the provisions of Roman law and the requirements imposed on the arbitration intermediary in the Middle Ages and Modern times. Historical comparison revealed a tendency to reduce the number of mandatory features of the candidate for arbitration, which determined the growing importance of the freedom of the disputing parties as the most significant feature of the arbitration court.

scholarly journals Preliminary Research on Computer-Assisted Transcription of Medieval Scripts in the Latin Alphabet using AI Computer Vision techniques and Machine Learning. A Romanian Exploratory Initiative

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-52
Author(s):  
Adinel C. Dincă ◽  
Emil Ștețco
Keyword(s):  
Computer Vision ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Handwritten Text ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
Software Engineers ◽  
Automatic Transcription ◽  
Text Images

"The objective of the present paper is to introduce to a wider audience, at a very early stage of development, the initial results of a Romanian joint initiative of AI software engineers and palaeographers in an experimental project aiming to assist and improve the transcription effort of medieval texts with AI software solutions, uniquely designed and trained for the task. Our description will start by summarizing the previous attempts and the mixed-results achieved in e-palaeography so far, a continuously growing field of combined scholarship at an international level. The second part of the study describes the specific project, developed by Zetta Cloud, with the aim of demonstrating that, by applying state of the art AI Computer Vision algorithms, it is possible to automatically binarize and segment text images with the final scope of intelligently extracting the content from a sample set of medieval handwritten text pages. Keywords: Middle Ages, Latin writing, palaeography, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, automatic transcription."

The Imperative Mandate in the Spanish Cortes of the Middle Ages

1930 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 886-912 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice M. Holden
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
Popular Government ◽  
National Representation ◽  
The Middle Ages

A study of the beginnings of national representation inevitably brings to the surface details which in their time were part or parcel of mediæval practices. One cannot expect that these usages, even as connected with representative institutions, can be of concern in our more complex modern circumstances, since the Middle Ages had comparatively few and simple problems for legislative solution. In those days the questions of relationship between the administrative and the legislative, and between the local and the central or national, had not emerged clearly. Nevertheless, such details and questions are interesting as examples of mediæval theory and efficiency, and, moreover, some of them are not entirely devoid of connection with present-day difficulties.The custom of making in advance a decision which was imposed by the electors upon their chosen representative, a custom known as the imperative mandate, was an important factor in early representative government. It was sound in legal theory, and some of its practice will be seen in the pages which follow. Also, its connection is with that early stage in popular government in which the development of representative institutions corresponded somewhat to one phase of the present. I refer to what is apparently a need to ask from the electors themselves their opinion on large, general questions of principle—for example, in our time, the referendum in Germany on the adoption of the Young Plan.

scholarly journals Veche and the terms “All Pskov” and “Pskov Men”: The Russian Medieval City Assembly as a Communal Structure

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexei A. Vovin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Political Institution ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
East European ◽  
Political Ties ◽  
Stage Of Development

The article focuses on the collective political institution, the veche, of the Russian medieval city of Pskov. The author argues that the horizontal political ties within that city prevailed over the vertical ones in the period before its subjugation to the Muscovite State in 1510. Pskov is put into a broad comparative perspective which results in the conclusion by the author that the development of Pskov in the fourteenth–fifteenth centuries very closely resembled that kind of urban synoecism which was practiced by Western European communes in their early stage of development (eleventh–twelfth centuries). It means, first, that the Russian Middle Ages repeated in some important features that which had occurred in Western Europe, and, second, that it happened not due to a borrowing of political institutions (as was the case with many East European countries) but independently because of similar conditions arising, albeit after a two-century delay.

scholarly journals EXPERIENCE OF USE OF THE RADIOCARBON METHOD DATING OF EARLY SLAVIC SITES FROM UKRAINE (1970—1987)

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 254-267
Author(s):  
O. V. Komar
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Radiocarbon Dating ◽  
Method Development ◽  
The Body ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Dating Method ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
The Middle Ages

The introduction of radiocarbon dating method in USSR and Ukrainian archeology was much slower compared to world practice. Natural scientific methods of dating in archeology have found quick application for the study of prehistoric sites — from the Paleolithic to the late Bronze Age. Much more time passed before the method began to be used for dating of sites of the 1st and 2nd millennium AD. The initiative of serial sampling from the medieval archaeological complexes of Ukraine for radiocarbon analysis initially came not from archaeologists. This led at the first stage to a confrontation between traditional archaeological methods of analysis and the new «revolutionary» approaches of the natural sciences. In 1968 mathematician A. S. Buhai collected 63 samples of charcoal from different parts of the «Zmievi Valy» («Snake Ramparts») and hillforts of the Kyiv region. At least 34 results were obtained from 3 different laboratories. All results attributed the time of existence of fortifications not to the Middle Ages, but to the 2nd century BC — 7th century AD, what caused the emergence of the sensational concept of the Early Slavic state in the Middle Dnieper region long before the formation of the Old Rus’ state. Institute of Archaeology (Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR) has developed a big project for complex researches of these fortifications led by M. P. Kuchera. During 1974—1985, many fortifications of «Zmievi Valy» in different regions were studied archaeologically. The facts of overlapping of settlements of the 3th—7th centuries AD by ramparts as well as the presence of Old Rus’ artifacts of the 10th—13th centuries in the body of wooden and earth structures of ramparts were recorded. Stratigraphic and archaeological data confidently dated the ramparts to the Middle Ages, while 28 radiocarbon dates for samples, carefully selected from wooden constructions of fortifications, showed a chaotic spread of dates from the 24th century BC until the 14th century AD. The verdict of M. P. Kuchera on the possibility of using the radiocarbon dating method for the archeology of Middle Ages was naturally negative. Geologist L. V. Firsov faced a similar problems after collecting in 1970 of 57 samples from archaeological complexes of Chersonesos and 33 samples from other sites of Crimea. Believing in the high accuracy of the radiocarbon dating method, he tried to explain the wide scatter of radiocarbon dates from the same medieval objects by their existence for half a millennium, what was rejected by archaeologists. The Institute Archeology and the Radiocarbon Laboratory of the Institute of Geochemistry and Mineral Physics af the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR managed joint project to get answers to the topical questions of Ukrainian archaeologists concerning the possibilities of the radiocarbon dating method in archeology. Two institutes approved a joint plan theme for 1973—1978 «Determination of the age of archeological sites by the natural scientific methods», for which a Coordination Council was established, led by D. Ya. Telegin and E. V. Sobotovich. According to the first report of the group, 237 samples were collected from various archaeological sites, for which 148 datings were successfully obtained (62.4 %). Cooperation continued further, but radiocarbon dates for archaeological cultures of the historical period from Ukraine had a little accuracy again on this stage of the radiocarbon method development (1974—1987). Thus, out of 31 examined medieval samples only 5 matched to archeological datings. 12 samples from sites of 6th — 10th centuries gave 7 dates, only 4 of them were in agreement with archaeological dating. For 12 samples from sites of Zarubyntsi and Chernyakhiv cultures 5 dates were received, and only one was in agreement with archaeological dating. The problem of the difference in these cases cannot be solved with the help of modern calibration of radiocarbon dates. After the complete fiasco of the initial stage of the radiocarbon dating of the medieval archaeological objects from Ukraine (1970—1973), a small step forward was made in 1974—1987. But this did not convince archaeologists in the rationality of using the method of radiocarbon dating for cultures with a wide choice of dating markers. The situation remained stable until the present stage of development of the accelerator mass spectrometry dating which makes again actual the renewal of the program of radiocarbon dating for the Early Slavic cultures of the 1st millennium AD.

II. Nationalism In The Middle Ages

1935 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. G. Coulton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Short Time ◽  
The Middle Ages

At an International Historical Congress of some years ago, one speaker explained that, so long as Europe had possessed one Church and one learned language (the Latin), nationalism was suppressed. This dictum received both contradiction and support; but the occasion was unsuited for any but the most superficial discussion. Ever since, however, I have noted passages which seemed to bear upon this important question; and I print them here, with the minimum of comment, by way of assistance to other students who may find time and inclination to pursue the matter further. Professor Marcel Handelsman of Warsaw has surveyed the subject, in brief, with a refinement of philosophical analysis to which I make no pretence. I try to use the term nationalism consistently within my own rough limits, but without attempt at scientific definition. My main object is to present evidence for the reader's judgment, without disguising the direction in which I lean myself: evidence varying a good deal in cogency from case to case, but with variations which any careful reader can estimate. Only thus can one start any really fruitful discussion. The multiplicity of indications collected in this comparatively short time convinces me that these are no more than the merest fraction of that which might be revealed by a concentrated search; but even this fraction may be enough to give a general idea of the whole.

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